Robert Kopp

Robert Kopp is a Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Associate Director of Rutgers Energy Institute and at Rutgers University. He serves as the director of Rutgers’ transdisciplinary Coastal Climate Risk & Resilience (C2R2) initiative, a training program which brings graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and urban planning together with coastal stakeholders to tackle the challenges that climate change poses to the world’s coastlines.

His research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change and on the interactions between physical climate change and the economy. He is a lead author of Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus (Columbia University Press, 2015) and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report, a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Assessing Approaches to Updating the Social Cost of Carbon, and a contributing author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report. He has authored over sixty scientific papers and several popular articles in venues including the New York Times

Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Prof. Kopp served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Policy and International Affairs and as a Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in geobiology from Caltech and his undergraduate degree in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago. He is a Leopold Leadership Fellow and a recipient of the International Union for Quaternary Research’s Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal and the American Geophysical Union’s William Gilbert Medal.